"sometimes it feels like something's wrong with me"

originally created June 10, 2023 ✦ republished February 8, 2025

(Originally posted on Instagram. This retroactive post is copied from the Instagram post.)

It tends to be that once school's out, there's a week-long adjustment period between being 100% mentally preoccupied with schoolwork, and being mentally relaxed and being able to be healthy and live a balanced life. Still, something feels different about it this time....

Some different parts of my body ache compared to last year. My mind feels tugged on by every errant train of thought or thing I see or hear, as if it has to feel strongly or be "invested" in it. Thanks to family drama I decline to disclose, the past few weeks have been overwhelming, and it feels like I've been irritable, or like I'm being overly-negative and rejecting people and doing other things that are only causing me more frustration and pain. And something new, it feels like I've been doing and saying a lot of things impulsively, like I'm out-of-control or I've let go of all my discipline, driving myself into greater exhaustion and overstimulation. It feels freaky, because this has never been a problem before, and I don't understand why this is happening!

I'm wondering if there's some kind of depression too, because there have been moments where this deeply sad feeling comes out of nowhere for seemingly no reason, and any ideas I come up with for things I could do just seem to bounce off the surface of my head and not even register as interesting, which is also scary.

Lately, I've been doing feelings-drawings in an unintelligent way, like all I'm doing is scribbling whatever, and it ends up looking more like a nice mess than something that actually reflects what states of mind and body I'm noticing in myself. So for this one, I did my best to think about what colors and what outlines would actually best reflect the model I had in my mind. It's been getting easier to think in that way, but just a few days ago I took a stab at this and it turned into some kind of melodramatic ratatouille.

It's frustrating that there are so many emotions and thoughts and ideas running around in me that just don't feel quite right. But perhaps the missing key is to be patient, and let these thoughts and emotions and other things be how they are; because it's only going to frustrate me if I compare how I feel now to how I think or remember I "should" feel. Maybe? Idk.

(ADDENDUM, AS PART OF THE RETROACTIVE POST: Below is the image I must've been talking about when I referred to "melodramatic ratatouille". I couldn't find it on my Insta, so it might be that this image is going to see the light of day for the first time via my blog??)